Utilizing our Regional Road Map and Chittenden BBF Regional Action Plan as our guide, the council has started to dig deeper into a few key issues this fall: Food Security, Substance Use Disorder (and the impact on families), Social/Emotional Development, and Early Childhood Advocacy. Our friends at Hunger Free Vermont and WIC helped to inform our council about the various resources available to combat food insecurity, and council members are charged with disseminating the info to the families they serve, community partners, and within their respective circles of influence.
The Substance Use Disorder Community of Practice has convened twice, with representation across several partners and agencies that serve adults and families in our region. We are in the process of narrowing down our priorities, based on the gaps we identified during these sessions, and will be developing key strategies across child and adult serving systems to better support families impacted by substance use.
An additional topic that bubbled to the surface in Chittenden is scaling up Early Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (Early MTSS) to support the social emotional development of children. We have recently developed a Leadership Team that aims to begin our work by cataloging what the current resources are in our region, and looking into the potential of sharing resources such as trainers and coaches across school districts and partner sites. We will also look to the future and gauge the interest of providing more Early MTSS trainings in 2019.
We welcomed Matt Levin from the Early Childhood Alliance and Natalie Glynn from Let’s Grow Kids to our November BBF Council meeting. Council members left feeling informed and motivated on how to engage as advocates for the very important legislative issues that are coming down the pike.
Bright Spot
We held a very successful STARS outreach event with our Early Learning Partners to discuss upcoming changes to the STARS rating system. Our region heavily promoted the event and we were excited that 81 people attended the learning session in Williston. It was informative and generated great questions and feedback. We
